Rod Oram : Defend the right to debate

It hasn’t stopped to amaze me how brilliantly the government spin worked in the lead-up to the recent election. It had almost an Orwellian quality of turning the meaning of words into the opposite (war is peace and peace is war).

Dirty tricks of the ‘Right’ as revealed by Nicky Hager turned into a conspiracy of the ‘Left’.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend on the evening of the release of “Dirty Politics”, which happened just before the six o’clock news. Nobody had read the book and knew what to make of it. Was it any good and based on facts or was it just a bad election hatched job full of falsehoods ?
My friend said that we only would have to watch the reaction the next morning. If the book was bad and full of falsehoods the government would attack the book and point out mistakes. If not they would attack the author. The reaction in the morning gave us the clear answer about the quality of the book. It was obviously untouchable.
The irony was that John Key already attacked the author as a leftwing conspiracy theorist well before he even knew what the book was about. At that time he suspected that it was going to be about spying and the GCSB.

This just goes to show how spin works totally detached from the facts. You only have to repeat it on end and you can turn truth into falsehood and falsehood into truth.